Personnel Data Made Public

A Court Case Prompts Release Of Councilman's Checkered Record As Police Officer

September 20, 2005|By DANIEL E. GOREN; Courant Staff Writer

PLAINVILLE — Councilman Andre Grandbois was disciplined or reprimanded more than a dozen times while he was a policeman between 1976 and 2002, according to his personnel file.

Grandbois, who is seeking re-election on the Republican slate, was disciplined for violations as small as using a police computer for personal reasons and as serious as planting a bomb on a colleague's locker, according to records in his personnel file. The chief officially commended him for good police work three times during that same period.

Police officials declined to comment for this story. But sources familiar with his file said that Grandbois' checkered record is highly unusual for a Plainville police officer.

Portions of Grandbois' file were released recently after he was named as a possible witness in a lawsuit about illegal election advertisements in the 2001 election. Jeannette Hinkson, the publisher of the Plainville Hometown Connection newspaper, said in a deposition that Grandbois could verify her claims that those who accused her of participating in election law violations were "out to get her." A lawyer in that case asked for the file so he could question Grandbois' credibility as a witness. The case is still pending and Grandbois has not been called to testify.

Grandbois' allies say his personnel file does not accurately represent the man they know. They say most of the file is old news or silly jokes he played when the police department culture was more relaxed.

Grandbois said he has ``no problems with anyone coming in to see my file.'' People will only see ``a flash in the pan,'' he said.

``I've been a pain in the ass, questioning stuff, for 25 to 30 years,'' Grandbois said. ``Do I play practical jokes? Yes. Do I have a temper? Yes, absolutely. But I'm a lot better now than I was then.''

Of the episodes in Grandbois' file, four stand out:

On the night of Dec. 4, 1986, Grandbois hatched a plan to play a joke on a junior officer, according to a letter of reprimand in his file.

Grandbois persuaded a colleague to dispatch a junior officer to check a burglar alarm in a secluded part of town. When the junior officer arrived, Grandbois and the other police officer threw eggs at the junior officer's cruiser.

``Every throw was a direct hit,'' Grandbois said, claiming that the junior officer was screaming into his radio, ``I'm being shot at! I'm under fire!''

With the cruiser dripping yolk, Grandbois told the officer that the egging had been a ``training exercise'' to see how he would react to an emergency.

One week later, Grandbois was dispatched to a fast-food restaurant where a device that looked like a bomb had been found.

The device came apart in Grandbois' hands. He took the pieces to police headquarters, according to his file. But instead of entering the bomb as evidence, Grandbois decided to play another practical joke. He brought in a ``railroad torpedo,'' an explosive once used by railroad workers.

``I said, `Let's make it look like a real bomb,'" Grandbois said last week. ``So we hooked the wires up ... it was just a joke.''

He attached the contraption to a fellow officer's locker. An investigation later determined that, with the railroad torpedo attached, the device could have blown up, but Grandbois disputes that.

``It takes about 2,000 pounds of pressure to make those things go boom,'' he said.

Grandbois received a 10-day suspension for the egging and bomb pranks, but served only five days after he filed a grievance.

In 1987, on an evening when Grandbois was the shift supervisor, a dispatcher got a call from a woman going through a divorce who claimed her husband was violating a protective order.

The man was John Kisluk, who today is running with Grandbois as a Republican candidate for town council. Kisluk and his wife were good friends with Grandbois at the time.

Kisluk's wife accused her husband of not staying on public property when he came to pick up their daughters, according to Grandbois' file.

Grandbois spent 30 minutes trying to negotiate ``a settlement short of an arrest,'' according to the file.

His relationship with the Kisluks had made Grandbois incapable of ``objectively investigating'' the complaint, and in doing so put the town and police department in ``a position of costly liability in the event that Mrs. Kisluk suffered injury at the hands of John Kisluk,'' the police chief wrote.

While it is true that Kisluk drove his car into the driveway of her private property when he picked up the children, it was to avoid loading the children on a street heavy with traffic, Kisluk and Grandbois said.

Kisluk says he never left the vehicle and that he was never convicted of any crime.

Shortly before Grandbois retired in 2002, he accused two superior officers, Sgt. Dean Cyr and Sgt. Charles Smedick, of planting ``crack'' cocaine in the back of his police cruiser, according to an internal investigation into the incident.